Blog Your Blessings: One Swift Kick

For the length of a family Christmas party, a first-grade boy wears a hard plastic Rudolph nose that lights up.

At the end of the evening, an older cousin says to him with a laugh, "Sorry, but I just have to do this," and plucks the nose away from the little boy's face and snaps it.

To say "ouch" would be to say the least.

"No problem," the first-grader responds. "I just have to do this!" And he delivers a swift kick straight into the shin of the older boy.

End of conversation. "Nobody chastised A---," his father later says with a smile of pride. [I have deleted my nephew's name to protect the proactive, of course.]

Damn right they didn't, I think to myself, and I smile and laugh out loud, too. That swift kick said it all. I am an indulgent aunt; this child can do no wrong in my eyes. Nosireebob, he is perfect in every way.

Yet he assaulted a child who was only having a bit of fun at Christmas.

Right?

Isn't that right, Sandy? You do, after all, teach kids many of whom spend more time with their parole officers than with you precisely because they cannot control their anger. Your students sometimes leave school in manacles because they forget to use their words when they are angry and resort to physical violence, instead. They forget justice is a way of thinking rather than a way of behaving nowadays. What, oh what, will become of a nephew who takes justice in his own hands?

I think he will accompany my daughter when she goes out on dates. He will keep an eye on her husband one day. He will keep his aunt safe so she doesn't have to put bars on the windows someday.

He will perhaps grow up to wear adult-sized Marine fatigues not unlike the junior version he prefers to all his other pants. He will perhaps put his prompt thinking, his respect for fair play, and his refusal to tolerate abuse to good work for the good of the rest of us someday.

Right now I am grateful he takes care of himself, that he knows he is worthy of respect. And the next time some older kid tries to mess with him, the older kid will do well to remember what his first-grade teacher should have told him--"Use your words, dear."

Tonight, though, I'm going to sleep well knowing my nephew is in this world. The world needs this little man of action!

PS No sooner did I draft this than I read this: If we ever, God forbid, manage to make each child succeed with his peer group, we will produce a race of bland and faceless nonentities, and all poetry and mystery will vanish from the face of the earth. Somehow I am not worried. Surely every teacher must want each child to succeed...must hope to help him find a self, but this self must be a nonconforming self. And surely there will always be the occasional prickly child who rejects all efforts, who kicks the other children, bites teacher's hands, is unloving and unlovable, and yet who will, one day--perhaps out of this very unloveliness--create a work of art which sings of love. Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet)

Blog Your Blessings